15 ms·

Lies Employers Use to Get You to Work with Them

89 points by jilted 11y ago

jilted 11y ago
Interesting read. I've personally seen other 'tactics' used, most notably a former company's CFO told my Manager that I was being paid 20k more in Salary than I actually was. This 20k was then subtracted from the IT Budget presumably on a yearly basis. Any other stories from readers?
monroepe 11y ago
My new manager just admitted to me a couple weeks back that my old manager (who is his manager now) straight up lied to me to get me in the door. He lied about how quickly my salary would increase. They told me that every six months salary is generally increased. Now that six months has come, he tells me that it is very rare for an increase mid-year.
- RogerL 11y ago
  If it isn't in writing, it doesn't count. Heck, in writing doesn't count for much if it isn't part of a contract.
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    Most contracts (at least in the US) can be terminated by the employer at will with no further obligation to the employee. The only terms that are meaningful are those that obligate the employer to payment unconditionally, or upon termination.
  - monroepe 11y ago
    That's what my friend told me too when I was considering the original offer. I actually flat out rejected it because it was far too low. They went up a little bit when I did that and then the promises came too. I figured 6 months wasn't so long and I could always look for something else if they don't keep their end.
- thirdtruck 11y ago
  How do you know which of the two managers is lying? (Could be both.)
  - monroepe 11y ago
    Haha. True.
- omouse 11y ago
  I got the same bait & switch; hired as a contractor "consultant" for 60/hr and then got a job offer for 70k but the manager said it's possible to go up to 90k. I assumed I'd be starting at 80k because I don't see any opportunity for advancement here. How do you get to 90k if there's no chance of moving up? Worse still is the fact that the salary/performance review comes up in a few weeks and I started in January. Getting the job offer at all apparently counts as the performance review so to get a salary increase or title upgrade I effectively have to wait 1.5 years.
carsongross 11y ago
This is just another instance of western societies devolving from a high-trust environment into a low-trust environment. In the short term, cheating in the prisoners dilemma of social trust is beneficial for the cheater, but in the long run it ends up resulting in lower economic growth, making everyone poorer. Social trust is the key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.
- angelbob 11y ago
  What do you see in contrast to "the west"? I'm just curious what you're comparing the US (and possibly Western Europe) to. I don't see China as being a tremendously high-trust social environment, for instance.
  - jpt4 11y ago
    > What do you see in contrast to "the west"? The West of a previous time, presumably.
    - r0naa 11y ago
      OP will correct me if I am mistaken but I read it that way: The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past. I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.
      - PopeOfNope 11y ago
        Media plays a part as well. It's hard to trust your neighbors when you're constantly seeing and hearing about people doing horrific things to each other on the nightly news.
suttree 11y ago
Is it just me or does reading an article on LinkedIn about people lying at work feel like a recursive loop?
- angelbob 11y ago
  It's just seeing it from the other side. Both sides lie, and both sides have coping tactics for the lies of the other.
  - suttree 11y ago
    That's a very reasonable opinion, fair point.
basseq 11y ago
1, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are weasel words. What is "a lot"; what is "extensive"; how often is "on occasion"? They're not lies: they just mean nothing. 2 and 3 are firm statements: ask for them in writing. Even if they're not in an official employment contract, an email stating same might give you enough ammo for a Fraudulent Inducement Of Employment case (if push came to shove). Ask follow-up questions to get a quantitative answer based on past performance. Promises of future raises (or other future actions) are complete BS and should be treated as such.
- slantyyz 11y ago
  >> They're not lies: they just mean nothing. Everything in the article's list is a basically gratuitous promise. Things change -- the economy, the financial performance of the company, management, etc. Any change can be justification to nullify one or more of those promises. The easy way to see if the hiring company is lying? Ask them to put everything in the contract, and put --numbers-- where applicable (30 days of training at the company's expense per year, ability to work at home 2 out of 5 business days, budget to hire help if workload exceeds 50h/week, etc.). It'll be pretty clear whether they're lying or telling the truth if they start balking at specifics.
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    No one is going to put that stuff in a contract unless it's a senior management position. The company cares much less about hiring you, no matter who you are, than about capping its liability. If you do manage to get such terms written in, you can bet that the company will still have no obligation to you as it can simply terminate the contract at any time without compensation. Even in a strong market, there are plenty of other candidates out there who will either value the gratuitous promises or simply ignore them, so there's no need to risk any real contractual liability just to hire you.
    - slantyyz 11y ago
      > No one is going to put that stuff in a contract unless it's a senior management position. Of course they won't. In all fairness, I don't think anyone who has been around the block would be tricked by any of the items in the list, but I'm sure a lot of less experienced job hunters could be. SO, if you are a person who weighs a decision on these gratuitous promises what is the best course of action to see if the prospective employer is lying? Probably to ask for all that stuff spelled out in detail in the employment contract. Sure, you may not get hired for the reasons you cited, but it'll become pretty clear that those promises were empty too, and you'll handle the next opportunity differently.
anon987 11y ago
Great article! I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I start I find out I'm working with a bunch of duds. How can I get a big picture view of (almost) all of the people I will be working with along with their skill levels? I don't expect everyone in the company to be all A team or B team tier, but I don't want to be a part of an organization where 80% of the people are barley qualified to do their job.
- angelbob 11y ago
  Start by asking, "who would my manager be?" or "who would my team be?" If you're not being interviewed by anybody who will be on your prospective team, that's already a red flag. You should be talking to your future coworkers (and maybe others, sure) and you should know which ones they are.
  - anon987 11y ago
    Oh I understand that. To be more precise: Let's say I will be working on a team of 5 people. They send the manager and the smartest guy and things look great, but how do I gauge the skill level of the people who aren't there along with the skill level of other teams. For example, maybe my team is great, but I'll be working with other teams (infra guys, networking guys, legacy systems guys, whatever) who are obstructive and unskilled. How do you get outside the "interview box" to see more of the company?
    - RogerL 11y ago
      "Show me the code base" Haven't tried that, not sure how it would go over, but I feel pretty reluctant to go somewhere new without getting that chance.
    - hga 11y ago
      Judging the other teams is going to be more difficult, but for your boss and teammates, at some point in the process before you accept the job offer, say you want to spend a little time with them. Some combination of luck and observation, and/or good social skills, might elucidate how the team's interactions go with other teams. As mentioned above, a refusal to do this is a huge red flag. Even for a company like Google, which routinely does this. There are a zillion horror stories resulting from their closed allocation policy, like the hardware guy who was given a job doing vaguely hardware related Python programming. Without the option of moving to another team for 18 months per Google's policy (de facto if not de jure), he had no choice but to quickly resign to avoid ruining his career. And I should mention what happened in my last job, where I wasn't able to do that, and the boss I was assigned to, who had absolutely no buy in, he wasn't given a choice about my working for him, took an instant dislike to me. That did not end well. Echoing the theme of this subthread, for my last N jobs, in all but one recruitment I was substantially lied to. The one before that said I'd get enough time to review the org's long abandoned legacy software before a very firm (government contract) commitment to how long it would take to make it viable again. Before that, the manager didn't reveal she'd taken an offer to move to a subsidiary that was splitting off. She guilelessly told me that the previous attempt to hire someone in my position failed because she'd mentioned that. That job ended when The company before that had a pattern of hiring a "second" techie only after the current one had given notice, without telling prospects they'd soon be responsible for it all. Two before that I learned later that my boss didn't want to hire me, but I was the only one who passed his whiteboard programming test (which for me was so easy I hardly remembered it by that time) and the company would have otherwise died, and I was fired as soon as they convinced the guy they really wanted to move from SV back to the D.C. area. Before that, I joined a company just as a couple of devil investors took it over with what we soon enough learned was the express intent of owning all the company; they deliberately sabotaged the launch just to have 100% of nothing (granted, this was investor betrayal, in the denouncement 13 of us simultaneously resigned). Before that, no bad faith can remember, at least starting out, and those jobs and organizations were substantially more successful. If this sort of thing has indeed become a pattern, we shouldn't be surprised by general economic stagnation, whatever the other secular causes there might be.
jackmaney 11y ago
And then they wonder why good employees often leave with--usually at most--two weeks of warning...
tjradcliffe 11y ago
If employers really want people to work with them, they will pay them more. Everything else is meaningless and unenforcable. Cash on the barrel is the only thing that counts. For job seekers, it's fair and reasonable to assume that any employer who makes promises against the future is lying, so for every promise you are made ("You'll eventually get to work on cool technology X!") you should increase your starting salary expectations, because you need to get a fair wage for being lied to.
white-flame 11y ago
The best defense is a good offense. In other words, you should not be locked into your relationship with your employer, especially as a new hire. It's always your option to quit if things aren't as advertised, and not worth salvaging. This means managing your finances and attitudes to be more mobile, and not basing your security and contentedness on the good will of your employer. Bad employers act a lot like political candidates. The hiring process is the campaign, and once the votes are tallied and the position is locked in, the worker is subjected to things not quite as described. You never know what things are going to be like for your personal situation regardless of how much you read up on company experiences, so keep a fallback plan open, sacrifice to maintain a financial buffer, and don't get bogged down in your possessions and location. This mindset is also useful even when your employer is great, in family emergencies and other life-upheaving events.
- spacko 11y ago
  This strategy would only work if "bad employers" (in this context those who will lie during the hiring process) are in the minority. Even a lying employer can still end up being a comparatively good place to work - but nonetheless - your strategy will just repeat the situation and at some point you will have to explain why you are switching all the time.
Aloisius 11y ago
I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me. Lying to someone about what their life would be like working at the company seems totally counterproductive to that goal. I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers. I'm lucky to be asked basic questions like what time people are expected into the office in the morning let alone someone asking for concrete examples of advancement. Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult - just breaking down their defensive barriers so they'll relax and give me candid answers can take half my time. Still, there is only so much I can do in a limited amount of time, so at the end I just try to lay out what an average work day looks like and my philosophy as their manager and hope that they will be able to make an informed decision.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  The essence of the modern employment contract is that we keep showing up and doing more or less what we're told, and you keep the paychecks coming until doing so would jeopardize senior management pay, at which point you kick us to the curb with nothing. Anyone on either side of the table expecting something else is delusional. > I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me. Then you're not going to hire anyone, your empire will stagnate or shrink, and you will not be promoted into senior management. At some point you will be kicked to the curb. Lying enables you to hire people who might otherwise be unavailable or much more expensive. When the labor market is weak, this isn't very important, but in a strong labor market it can be the difference between growing your organization and losing it to attrition. Assuming you're not willing/able to pay more than your competition (no one is), lying to candidates is going to be among your top tactics. By the time they both know they've been lied to and are upset enough to want to do anything about it, they'll have kids and a mortgage, or there will be another recession, or some other circumstance will trap them. They're not happy, but you are: by growing your team, you've earned a promotion to director. Sure, your hires are less productive than starry-eyed believers, but there aren't enough of the latter to staff a giant corporation (or even a medium-sized one), and senior management pay is based primarily on the size of one's empire. There's no point in a staffing policy that limits empire growth. A giant company, even a very inefficient one, pays senior managers far more in absolute terms than a smaller, more profitable one. Therefore it's in the interests of the senior managers to encourage hiring as many people as possible as long as they're cheap, regardless of whether they're happy or productive (and don't worry, if business is bad, they can be kicked to the curb). As a line manager, it's in your interest to go along with this no matter what it takes, because that's how you climb the ladder. > I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers. It's more that there's little point in asking because the assumption is that you will lie. At best, even honest answers have a very short shelf life; the experienced candidate assumes that conditions will change quickly and for the worse. Most importantly of all, the candidate knows he or she will have no recourse if conditions are not as advertized, regardless of the reason. That makes the answers non-actionable, and thus the questions a waste of time. > Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult We don't tell you because we know you don't care. People have been getting a lot smarter about the employer-employee relationship over the past decade or two. A corporation exists primarily for the benefit of senior managers: it gives them a place to compete with one another, engage in cutthroat politics, try out pet theories about business and management, and gives them the lion's share of the business's profits for little or no work. It does not exist for the benefit of the rank and file, customers, or shareholders. Few people are so foolish as to expect anything but misery and insecurity as a member of the rank and file. Why give you information you can use against us later? Put another way, what's in it for us?
erikb 11y ago
The article is more reasonable than the headline for me. I don't think most employers around me lie on purpose. It's really that kind of situation were you try hard to be good to the other person, but in the end real life hits you in the face and you don't come around to deliver as much as promised. I'd argue I fell in that trap a few times myself.
michaelochurch 11y ago
Flat hierarchy is a big one. Many startups use it to convince junior hires that they'll be two hops from the CEO when, in fact, that CTO has 75 reports and the junior engineer is actually two de facto levels below where he was told he'd be in the offer letter. Investor contact is another, related, one. When engineers accept 0.05% equity slices at the expense of hedge-fund jobs, they're doing it because they've been told (and haven't had the life experience to have doubts) that they'll have investor contact within 6 months if they do a good job, and have the connections necessary to be founders inside of 18 months. It almost never happens that way.
PaulHoule 11y ago
You know a recruiter is a fresher when they say that they need to fill this job real fast because the last guy burned out.
- hwstar 11y ago
  Red Flags... Immediate requirement to fill a newly opened position. Must be able to assume a project which had abrupt departures of project members. Must be able to work in a fast-paced environment. Travel required.
linuxydave 11y ago
Hah, #1, #4, and #5 happened at my very first job. I was young and naive.
wolfgke 11y ago
Why don't you ensure that all the promises simply written down in the employment agreement, so that in case that you are betrayed you have a lever (on the other hand: If the employer are not willing to write it into the employment agreement, there is a chance that he will try to cheat you sooner or later).
- hwstar 11y ago
  What employment agreement? In the US most everyone is employed "at-will" which means you or your employer can terminate the employment relationship for any reason whatsoever. It's usually only C-level executives which have employment agreements in the US.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    I knew that the US have no period of notice for employments (and thus the employment can be canceled at about anytime). But I wasn't aware that there are usually no employment agreements in the US.

89 points by jilted 11y ago

Interesting read. I've personally seen other 'tactics' used, most notably a former company's CFO told my Manager that I was being paid 20k more in Salary than I actually was. This 20k was then subtracted from the IT Budget presumably on a yearly basis. Any other stories from readers?

monroepe 11y ago

My new manager just admitted to me a couple weeks back that my old manager (who is his manager now) straight up lied to me to get me in the door. He lied about how quickly my salary would increase. They told me that every six months salary is generally increased. Now that six months has come, he tells me that it is very rare for an increase mid-year.

RogerL 11y ago
If it isn't in writing, it doesn't count. Heck, in writing doesn't count for much if it isn't part of a contract.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  Most contracts (at least in the US) can be terminated by the employer at will with no further obligation to the employee. The only terms that are meaningful are those that obligate the employer to payment unconditionally, or upon termination.
- monroepe 11y ago
  That's what my friend told me too when I was considering the original offer. I actually flat out rejected it because it was far too low. They went up a little bit when I did that and then the promises came too. I figured 6 months wasn't so long and I could always look for something else if they don't keep their end.
thirdtruck 11y ago
How do you know which of the two managers is lying? (Could be both.)
- monroepe 11y ago
  Haha. True.
omouse 11y ago
I got the same bait & switch; hired as a contractor "consultant" for 60/hr and then got a job offer for 70k but the manager said it's possible to go up to 90k. I assumed I'd be starting at 80k because I don't see any opportunity for advancement here. How do you get to 90k if there's no chance of moving up? Worse still is the fact that the salary/performance review comes up in a few weeks and I started in January. Getting the job offer at all apparently counts as the performance review so to get a salary increase or title upgrade I effectively have to wait 1.5 years.

carsongross 11y ago

This is just another instance of western societies devolving from a high-trust environment into a low-trust environment. In the short term, cheating in the prisoners dilemma of social trust is beneficial for the cheater, but in the long run it ends up resulting in lower economic growth, making everyone poorer. Social trust is the key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.

angelbob 11y ago
What do you see in contrast to "the west"? I'm just curious what you're comparing the US (and possibly Western Europe) to. I don't see China as being a tremendously high-trust social environment, for instance.
- jpt4 11y ago
  > What do you see in contrast to "the west"? The West of a previous time, presumably.
  - r0naa 11y ago
    OP will correct me if I am mistaken but I read it that way: The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past. I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.
    - PopeOfNope 11y ago
      Media plays a part as well. It's hard to trust your neighbors when you're constantly seeing and hearing about people doing horrific things to each other on the nightly news.

suttree 11y ago

Is it just me or does reading an article on LinkedIn about people lying at work feel like a recursive loop?

angelbob 11y ago
It's just seeing it from the other side. Both sides lie, and both sides have coping tactics for the lies of the other.
- suttree 11y ago
  That's a very reasonable opinion, fair point.

basseq 11y ago

1, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are weasel words. What is "a lot"; what is "extensive"; how often is "on occasion"? They're not lies: they just mean nothing. 2 and 3 are firm statements: ask for them in writing. Even if they're not in an official employment contract, an email stating same might give you enough ammo for a Fraudulent Inducement Of Employment case (if push came to shove). Ask follow-up questions to get a quantitative answer based on past performance. Promises of future raises (or other future actions) are complete BS and should be treated as such.

slantyyz 11y ago
>> They're not lies: they just mean nothing. Everything in the article's list is a basically gratuitous promise. Things change -- the economy, the financial performance of the company, management, etc. Any change can be justification to nullify one or more of those promises. The easy way to see if the hiring company is lying? Ask them to put everything in the contract, and put --numbers-- where applicable (30 days of training at the company's expense per year, ability to work at home 2 out of 5 business days, budget to hire help if workload exceeds 50h/week, etc.). It'll be pretty clear whether they're lying or telling the truth if they start balking at specifics.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  No one is going to put that stuff in a contract unless it's a senior management position. The company cares much less about hiring you, no matter who you are, than about capping its liability. If you do manage to get such terms written in, you can bet that the company will still have no obligation to you as it can simply terminate the contract at any time without compensation. Even in a strong market, there are plenty of other candidates out there who will either value the gratuitous promises or simply ignore them, so there's no need to risk any real contractual liability just to hire you.
  - slantyyz 11y ago
    > No one is going to put that stuff in a contract unless it's a senior management position. Of course they won't. In all fairness, I don't think anyone who has been around the block would be tricked by any of the items in the list, but I'm sure a lot of less experienced job hunters could be. SO, if you are a person who weighs a decision on these gratuitous promises what is the best course of action to see if the prospective employer is lying? Probably to ask for all that stuff spelled out in detail in the employment contract. Sure, you may not get hired for the reasons you cited, but it'll become pretty clear that those promises were empty too, and you'll handle the next opportunity differently.

anon987 11y ago

Great article! I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I start I find out I'm working with a bunch of duds. How can I get a big picture view of (almost) all of the people I will be working with along with their skill levels? I don't expect everyone in the company to be all A team or B team tier, but I don't want to be a part of an organization where 80% of the people are barley qualified to do their job.

angelbob 11y ago
Start by asking, "who would my manager be?" or "who would my team be?" If you're not being interviewed by anybody who will be on your prospective team, that's already a red flag. You should be talking to your future coworkers (and maybe others, sure) and you should know which ones they are.
- anon987 11y ago
  Oh I understand that. To be more precise: Let's say I will be working on a team of 5 people. They send the manager and the smartest guy and things look great, but how do I gauge the skill level of the people who aren't there along with the skill level of other teams. For example, maybe my team is great, but I'll be working with other teams (infra guys, networking guys, legacy systems guys, whatever) who are obstructive and unskilled. How do you get outside the "interview box" to see more of the company?
  - RogerL 11y ago
    "Show me the code base" Haven't tried that, not sure how it would go over, but I feel pretty reluctant to go somewhere new without getting that chance.
  - hga 11y ago
    Judging the other teams is going to be more difficult, but for your boss and teammates, at some point in the process before you accept the job offer, say you want to spend a little time with them. Some combination of luck and observation, and/or good social skills, might elucidate how the team's interactions go with other teams. As mentioned above, a refusal to do this is a huge red flag. Even for a company like Google, which routinely does this. There are a zillion horror stories resulting from their closed allocation policy, like the hardware guy who was given a job doing vaguely hardware related Python programming. Without the option of moving to another team for 18 months per Google's policy (de facto if not de jure), he had no choice but to quickly resign to avoid ruining his career. And I should mention what happened in my last job, where I wasn't able to do that, and the boss I was assigned to, who had absolutely no buy in, he wasn't given a choice about my working for him, took an instant dislike to me. That did not end well. Echoing the theme of this subthread, for my last N jobs, in all but one recruitment I was substantially lied to. The one before that said I'd get enough time to review the org's long abandoned legacy software before a very firm (government contract) commitment to how long it would take to make it viable again. Before that, the manager didn't reveal she'd taken an offer to move to a subsidiary that was splitting off. She guilelessly told me that the previous attempt to hire someone in my position failed because she'd mentioned that. That job ended when The company before that had a pattern of hiring a "second" techie only after the current one had given notice, without telling prospects they'd soon be responsible for it all. Two before that I learned later that my boss didn't want to hire me, but I was the only one who passed his whiteboard programming test (which for me was so easy I hardly remembered it by that time) and the company would have otherwise died, and I was fired as soon as they convinced the guy they really wanted to move from SV back to the D.C. area. Before that, I joined a company just as a couple of devil investors took it over with what we soon enough learned was the express intent of owning all the company; they deliberately sabotaged the launch just to have 100% of nothing (granted, this was investor betrayal, in the denouncement 13 of us simultaneously resigned). Before that, no bad faith can remember, at least starting out, and those jobs and organizations were substantially more successful. If this sort of thing has indeed become a pattern, we shouldn't be surprised by general economic stagnation, whatever the other secular causes there might be.

jackmaney 11y ago

And then they wonder why good employees often leave with--usually at most--two weeks of warning...

tjradcliffe 11y ago

If employers really want people to work with them, they will pay them more. Everything else is meaningless and unenforcable. Cash on the barrel is the only thing that counts. For job seekers, it's fair and reasonable to assume that any employer who makes promises against the future is lying, so for every promise you are made ("You'll eventually get to work on cool technology X!") you should increase your starting salary expectations, because you need to get a fair wage for being lied to.

white-flame 11y ago

The best defense is a good offense. In other words, you should not be locked into your relationship with your employer, especially as a new hire. It's always your option to quit if things aren't as advertised, and not worth salvaging. This means managing your finances and attitudes to be more mobile, and not basing your security and contentedness on the good will of your employer. Bad employers act a lot like political candidates. The hiring process is the campaign, and once the votes are tallied and the position is locked in, the worker is subjected to things not quite as described. You never know what things are going to be like for your personal situation regardless of how much you read up on company experiences, so keep a fallback plan open, sacrifice to maintain a financial buffer, and don't get bogged down in your possessions and location. This mindset is also useful even when your employer is great, in family emergencies and other life-upheaving events.

spacko 11y ago
This strategy would only work if "bad employers" (in this context those who will lie during the hiring process) are in the minority. Even a lying employer can still end up being a comparatively good place to work - but nonetheless - your strategy will just repeat the situation and at some point you will have to explain why you are switching all the time.

Aloisius 11y ago

I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me. Lying to someone about what their life would be like working at the company seems totally counterproductive to that goal. I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers. I'm lucky to be asked basic questions like what time people are expected into the office in the morning let alone someone asking for concrete examples of advancement. Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult - just breaking down their defensive barriers so they'll relax and give me candid answers can take half my time. Still, there is only so much I can do in a limited amount of time, so at the end I just try to lay out what an average work day looks like and my philosophy as their manager and hope that they will be able to make an informed decision.

fredkbloggs 11y ago
The essence of the modern employment contract is that we keep showing up and doing more or less what we're told, and you keep the paychecks coming until doing so would jeopardize senior management pay, at which point you kick us to the curb with nothing. Anyone on either side of the table expecting something else is delusional. > I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me. Then you're not going to hire anyone, your empire will stagnate or shrink, and you will not be promoted into senior management. At some point you will be kicked to the curb. Lying enables you to hire people who might otherwise be unavailable or much more expensive. When the labor market is weak, this isn't very important, but in a strong labor market it can be the difference between growing your organization and losing it to attrition. Assuming you're not willing/able to pay more than your competition (no one is), lying to candidates is going to be among your top tactics. By the time they both know they've been lied to and are upset enough to want to do anything about it, they'll have kids and a mortgage, or there will be another recession, or some other circumstance will trap them. They're not happy, but you are: by growing your team, you've earned a promotion to director. Sure, your hires are less productive than starry-eyed believers, but there aren't enough of the latter to staff a giant corporation (or even a medium-sized one), and senior management pay is based primarily on the size of one's empire. There's no point in a staffing policy that limits empire growth. A giant company, even a very inefficient one, pays senior managers far more in absolute terms than a smaller, more profitable one. Therefore it's in the interests of the senior managers to encourage hiring as many people as possible as long as they're cheap, regardless of whether they're happy or productive (and don't worry, if business is bad, they can be kicked to the curb). As a line manager, it's in your interest to go along with this no matter what it takes, because that's how you climb the ladder. > I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers. It's more that there's little point in asking because the assumption is that you will lie. At best, even honest answers have a very short shelf life; the experienced candidate assumes that conditions will change quickly and for the worse. Most importantly of all, the candidate knows he or she will have no recourse if conditions are not as advertized, regardless of the reason. That makes the answers non-actionable, and thus the questions a waste of time. > Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult We don't tell you because we know you don't care. People have been getting a lot smarter about the employer-employee relationship over the past decade or two. A corporation exists primarily for the benefit of senior managers: it gives them a place to compete with one another, engage in cutthroat politics, try out pet theories about business and management, and gives them the lion's share of the business's profits for little or no work. It does not exist for the benefit of the rank and file, customers, or shareholders. Few people are so foolish as to expect anything but misery and insecurity as a member of the rank and file. Why give you information you can use against us later? Put another way, what's in it for us?

erikb 11y ago

The article is more reasonable than the headline for me. I don't think most employers around me lie on purpose. It's really that kind of situation were you try hard to be good to the other person, but in the end real life hits you in the face and you don't come around to deliver as much as promised. I'd argue I fell in that trap a few times myself.

michaelochurch 11y ago

Flat hierarchy is a big one. Many startups use it to convince junior hires that they'll be two hops from the CEO when, in fact, that CTO has 75 reports and the junior engineer is actually two de facto levels below where he was told he'd be in the offer letter. Investor contact is another, related, one. When engineers accept 0.05% equity slices at the expense of hedge-fund jobs, they're doing it because they've been told (and haven't had the life experience to have doubts) that they'll have investor contact within 6 months if they do a good job, and have the connections necessary to be founders inside of 18 months. It almost never happens that way.

PaulHoule 11y ago

You know a recruiter is a fresher when they say that they need to fill this job real fast because the last guy burned out.

hwstar 11y ago
Red Flags... Immediate requirement to fill a newly opened position. Must be able to assume a project which had abrupt departures of project members. Must be able to work in a fast-paced environment. Travel required.

linuxydave 11y ago

Hah, #1, #4, and #5 happened at my very first job. I was young and naive.

wolfgke 11y ago

Why don't you ensure that all the promises simply written down in the employment agreement, so that in case that you are betrayed you have a lever (on the other hand: If the employer are not willing to write it into the employment agreement, there is a chance that he will try to cheat you sooner or later).

hwstar 11y ago
What employment agreement? In the US most everyone is employed "at-will" which means you or your employer can terminate the employment relationship for any reason whatsoever. It's usually only C-level executives which have employment agreements in the US.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  I knew that the US have no period of notice for employments (and thus the employment can be canceled at about anytime). But I wasn't aware that there are usually no employment agreements in the US.